Digital Games and the American Gothic:
Investigating Gothic Game Grammar
Tanya Krzywinska1
Brunel University
Abstract
This essay shows that the American Gothic has a powerful presence in digital games and that it
has become a part of contemporary game grammar. There is a close investigation into the ways
in which the formal, participatory characteristics of games shape the ways in which the American
Gothic appears. Close textual analysis is made of Alan Wake and The Secret World. In addition
to analysis of their ludic dimensions, principle themes, intertextual borrowing and their means
of delivering story, there is consideration of the way that these games produce certain styles
of Gothic reading: in the case of The Secret World, a conspiracy-style hermeneutic. The essay
demonstrates that within digital games the American Gothic is defined by the use of textual tropes
such as setting and theme rather than in terms of national authorship. It concludes that games are
shaping the American Gothic into new forms and provide new ways of engaging with it.
Keywords: Digital Games; Survival Horror; popular culture; technology; HP Lovecraft; Edgar Allan
Poe; Stephen King, Conspiracy theory, Chaos Theory, Myth, Magic, Magic Realism.
W
hat might we mean if we declare that a digital game is ‘American
Gothic’? Does such a claim rest on the idea that the game in question
draws on tropes and traditions associated with the American Gothic?
Or, more simply, do we just mean that a Gothic game is set in the US? Alternatively,
are we referring to a Gothic game that has been made by a US development studio? In
1. Tanya Krzywinska has been Professor in Screen Studies at Brunel University since 1996. She
is the author of several books and many articles on different aspects of video games and on
representations of the occult and of sex/sexuality. Currently she is working on a monograph, Gothic
Games and on an interactive Gothic fiction, ‘The Witch’s Room’. She convenes a Masters and PhD
program entitled “Digital Games: Theory and Design” at Brunel University. Tanya.krzywinska@
brunel.ac.uk.
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all these cases a national accent is emphasised and assigned a primary role in how the
Gothic is deployed in a given game. Placing emphasis on national accent dovetails with
a broadly socio-cultural approach to understanding texts in terms of the cultural context
of their production. Such an approach has merit, but suffers from the problem of putting
culture before text, rather than seeing culture as text. Games which deploy American
Gothic are not necessarily made by Americans, and the America seen in such games
is a textual and fictional property woven from a web of intertextual and intercultural
reflections and refractions. In addition, the national accent of the American Gothic is
also not the only factor that gives a game its shape and character. All media have their
own distinctive formal properties and digital games have characteristics that, when
considered collectively, are unique. Their formal properties of play a significant role
in the way that the Gothic is adapted, shaping it in ways that are stronger than ‘accent’
alone. Digital games present something of a problem on another front in their relation to
the American Gothic, because unlike some literature and television that are popularly
thought of as American Gothic, the term is very rarely used in their commercial or
even academic categorisation. Generic categorisation tends instead to gravitate around
the primary action a player performs in game – a ‘shooter’ or ‘role-playing game’ for
example. But, the Gothic remains rife in digital games, finding its way into every
gaming genre. Among all its various manifestations, it is the American Gothic that
proves to be the most widespread Gothic accent to be found.
American Gothic is perhaps best understood as a flavour of the Gothic with a
particular accent. Given the longevity of Gothic fiction, it is unsurprising that it has
evolved and transformed, and that as a result there is a ‘palette’ of possible accents and
flavours that comprise the Gothic. We may speak of national flavours, but there are
also many other flavours that are not so solidly based in nationality or geography. That
the Gothic crosses boundaries easily has been noted by many theorists of the Gothic
(Botting, 1996 for example). Its metamorphic and agnostic (in terms of media) nature, in
combination with a characteristic focus on the evocation of emotion, seems to dispose
it to adaptation, allowing it to lend its flavour to various forms (novel, comics, short
story, film, television, games, etc.) and genres (comedy, melodrama, horror, science
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fiction, role-playing games, first person shooters, adventure, etc.). Claiming that an
articulation of the Gothic has an American accent does, however, mean that its particular
characterisation in a given game requires explanation. Perhaps the strongest claim on the
American Gothic can be made where a game employs recognisably Gothic themes and
is made in America, by an American development team and with an American audience
in mind. However, this scenario is far from unproblematic. Development teams are often
multi-cultural. Authorship in a commercial context is most likely to be collaborative,
involving a varied range of skills. Digital games aimed at a popular audience are rarely
the result of auteurist vision but, instead, driven by commercial imperative, by genre
and intertextuality. In addition to these factors, games are often made for audiences
of multiple nationalities and ethnicities. The situation is, therefore, more complex than
simply claiming ‘American Gothic’ is simply a result of the nationality of an author, as
might have been said perhaps of the work of Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft.
American culture itself is far from self-contained, and consumed across the globe
as part of daily life. The audience and fan-base for the American-made television
show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), for example, remains highly diverse in
terms of nationality (as well as in other markers of social and cultural difference).
American popular culture might be pervasive globally, but it is often referenced and
recontextualised in games that exhibit other accents; the Silent Hill franchise, which
is set in the US yet made by a Japanese development company provides a strong
indicative example. There are many games that are made by Nordic, British, Canadian
and Japanese based development companies which employ an American Gothic
accent, alongside traditional Gothic themes, and which locate the story and action
in a version of the United States. What might constitute an ‘American Gothic’ game
is, therefore, far from straightforward and as such presents some tricky problems.
But one of the values of not being afraid of entering this tangled and thorny thicket
is that our exploration will deepen our understanding of the form of contemporary
games and show how digital game form creates new ways of experiencing the Gothic.
Exploring digital games through the lens of American Gothic raises questions not
just about form, content and representation, but also about commercial contexts,
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authorship, textuality and engagement. Digital games have developed a universal
‘game grammar’, which alters our engagement not just with American Gothic but the
Gothic more generally. American Gothic has become a staple of that grammar.
Digital Games as Medium: Why we need to consider form.
If we are to understand the nature and complexities of the American Gothic in
relation to, and in the specific context, of digital games it is important to start out by
outlining how digital games differ in formal terms from other media. As opposed to
the more generalist category of ‘play’, games are regularly characterized by academics
as possessing a set of rules and some kind of winning condition or conditions. These
are structural features that distinguish games from less goal-directed forms of play.
Philosopher Roger Caillois (2001) proposed this distinction using the terms paidea
(play) and ludus (game). These opposed concepts underpin much academic work on
digital games (Juul, 2006; King and Krzywinska, 2006). We can easily see how games
are built fundamentally out of a set of rules if we consider Chess, for example, or
card games such Rummy or Patience (Solitaire), or board games such as Scrabble or
Monopoly. Digital games too are rule-based and most offer sets of winning conditions.
Digital games do, however, differ from other types of games because they are in their
entirety computational artefacts (hence my use of the term digital games rather than
videogames, a distinction made more valid with the recent popularity of games for
small handheld devices such as phones and tablets). Any game played with material
tokens and supports can be made into a digital game, as is evident in the case of
Solitaire/Patience. As with any digital game, rules are no longer in the domain of the
player but, instead, are administered by the computer. In the computerised version
of Solitaire/Patience, cards are not made of printed card and held in the hand by
the player, but are instead represented on screen and manipulated by some kind of
interface device such as a mouse. Examining the effect of digital adaptation proves
important if we are to gain a better understanding of the formal characteristics of
games and how this affects their version of American Gothic.
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Digital games have, therefore, to provide onscreen representations of real
materials. These, alongside story and character, are tools with which game designers
create meanings that allow players to make sense of computational and game rules in an
audio-visual context. Even though games need rules, they are therefore more than just
rule sets, as both Janet Murray (2001) and Barry Atkins (2003) have argued. In addition
to the use of various fictional devices to inculcate the player into the game, they are
in part simulations, as Jon Peterson (2012) has noted, thereby arguing that games are
particular types of fictional worlds. Because rules are hidden from the player’s view in
digital games, and are largely non-negotiable, the experience of playing a digital game
is very different to playing a board game. In a card or board game, at least one person
must attend to the rules of play and possibly keep the score (a possible source of dispute,
as well as creativity and negotiation). There are certainly many Gothic-themed board,
card or table-top role-playing games, Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium Games, 1981), Arkham
Horror (Fantasy Flight Games, 2005), The Glooms (Atlas Games, 2004) for example,
but our focus is digital games. In contrast to other types of games, the digital game is
screen-based, audio-visual in nature (close to film and television in this regard) and
it is comprised of computational algorithms, which respond to a player’s input. These
formal nodes constitute the nature of the medium of digital games and affect the way
that American Gothic is realised and experienced.
In order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the peculiar characteristics of
the digital game medium it is helpful to think of them as input/output devices that
work principally on feedback. Players respond to what they see and hear on the screen
and the game responds to that response. Many micro-transactions of this nature take
place, which lend the illusion of agency and of moving through a ‘real’ space. A game,
therefore, responds to a player’s actions and choices. In most games various types of
feedback provide commentary on progress in the game. For example, a player tries
to open a door, but as they have not yet found the key that opens that door, the game
responds to the player’s premature action with a discouraging sound or a voice saying
that a door is locked. This call-and-response structure prompts the player to look further
afield for a way to open the door. Like a Gothic detective, the player reads the game text
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closely to hunt for clues to help solve the puzzle and progress through the game. The
game designer will use variations on established game grammar conventions to provide
clues to enable the player to read the code of the game. The player is, therefore, required
to be attentive to the way the game is organised as a system, in which the procedural,
ludic and the semiotic/representational are united. Some aspects of the system will
be part of a pre-existing game grammar. For example, in most PC games the ‘w’ key
moves the player’s character forward, while pressing the spacebar makes them jump; in
Western console games the ‘x’ key acts as the principle ‘do’ key. It is not only interface
conventions that are in play, however: drooping sounds may indicate a failed action
for example, while visual anomalies are likely to indicate some kind of cue for action.
Each game will borrow from established game grammar, which also touches on textual
conventions such as genre, style and theme, to construct its own particular vocabulary.
A seasoned player can be said to have a high degree of game literacy. As a literate
player you may ‘naturally’ look for some place that a key might be hidden for example,
perhaps investigating an anomalously coloured brick in a wall, a slightly open drawer
or reading a letter placed on a desk for information as to your next action.
The narrative and hermeneutic potential of solving puzzles and looking into
mysteries informs fiction across media and is used in many texts that might be claimed
as American Gothic, perhaps best emblemised by Poe’s prototypical Gothic detective,
Dupin. A reader or viewer must, however, follow the investigations and reasoning of a
narrator-investigator, but in the context of a digital game it is the player who motivates
their investigation as an active agent. In addition to the activity, the player is also offered
choices, what might be termed ludic agency. The choices offered to players may have
anything from a zero to a profound effect on the game, and in some cases choice might
go beyond winning conditions to also affect story outcome. In Bioshock (2007, 2K
Games/Irrational Games) different endings ensue depending on whether a player has
chosen to kill or refrain from killing the ‘little sisters’. Silent Hill 2 (Konami/KCET,
2003) has five different potential endings, with more added in later versions of the
game. The alternate ending scenario is not used in all games, however. In other more
linear games, players might make choices along the way, but the resolution remains the
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same. While many games offer some degree of choice, they are nonetheless heavily
designed and authored environments and we march to the beat of the game design.
This can prove a source of frustration, where we may not be able to perform actions in
the prescribed manner, leaving one in stasis and unable to progress. Frustration might
also ensue where rules seem arbitrary and incoherent: ‘why can’t I jump over this tiny
boundary when before I was permitted to jump something four times as high!’. When
playing a board or card game rules can be re-written if necessary to ensure enjoyment.
The specific combination of agency and authoring is balanced differently across
the range of games and game genres that include elements of American Gothic, but in
all cases it is the participatory nature of games that sets them apart from other media.
Making good use of the direct address that they make to the player, games that draw
upon the Gothic generally tend to either centralise investigation or use it as a means
around which to organise other types of activities. Gothic games are extremely diverse,
ranging from simple shooters such as the House of the Dead series (Sega, 1998-2012) to
blockbuster games such Bioshock; single-player games such as the Silent Hill (Knomani/
KCET: 1999-present ) to multiplayer games such as Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 (Valve/EA, 2008,
2009) and The Secret World (Funcom/EA, 2012), and independent and art-based games
that seek to test the boundaries of digital game form such as Slender (Parsec, 2012) and
The Binding of Isaac (McMillen and Himsl, 2011)
Adapting the American Gothic for Digital Games
Having outlined some of the principle features of game media, a closer analysis is
now needed of the how the American Gothic is adapted to game form.
Alan Wake: Losing the Plot
Alan Wake (Remedy/Microsoft, 2010, 2012 PC version) is a single-player game
developed by the Finnish company Remedy for an international market. The game
follows its Max Payne games, which also made use of an American style and idiom,
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in that case Hard-boiled Noir. Both games feature male protagonists who have ‘lost
the plot’ – literally in the case of Wake - and whose normal lives have been radically
disrupted. The high concept of Alan Wake combines aspects of David Lynch’s
television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) with a distillation of Stephen King’s
fiction, spiced with lesser-order references to other forms of American Gothic
horror, such as various stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
(1963, US), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972, US) and George Romero’s Zombie
films (1968-2009). The eponymous Wake is our point of entry into the game; the
player controls this character’s actions and experiences events from his point of
view. This limited perspective is underlined by the thick layer of vocal narration
provided by the character and supplemented by dialogue-heavy cut-scenes. Wake
is a writer; a blocked horror fiction writer and as in Stephen King’s beleagueredwriter novel Misery (1987), proceedings start with a car accident in a remote backwoods location (back-woods representing the primal, the unconscious with an
American accent, while drawing on older uses of the forest in Gothic fiction more
generally). The story arcs around the enigmatic proposition that the nightmare that
Wake experiences seems to be based on a book he has written, but the contents of
which he has forgotten, thus vocalising a classic Gothic dream-logic scenario where
temporal order and agency become dis-ordered. This ambiguity contributes to the
game’s highly referential and self-referential style. The yoking of authorship to the
dissolution of borders between reality and fiction is therefore a pivotal theme of
the game. A strong American accent is evident through the geography of location
as most of the game is set in Bright Falls, Washington, a fictional small-town. It is
also present in the impasto-thick references to both Stephen King, as author and his
fiction, alongside the allusions to American Gothic ‘back-woods’ horror fiction. As
also occurs in stories written by American Gothic writers such as Poe, Melville and
James, Wake is faced with a multitude of unreadable signs and regularly exhibits
a ‘lack of interpretative certainty’ (Savoy, 2002: 179). Wake’s ostensible, forgotten
involvement in authoring the manifestation of evil hangs around the disappearance
of his wife. In this the game conforms to Savoy’s notion that American Gothic
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‘turn(s) obsessively to the personal, the familial and the national past’ (168). As a
result of these features, Alan Wake might be regarded as a quintessential work of
American Gothic in terms of story and theme, but how might the American Gothic
translate in terms of the ludic dimensions of gameplay?
The game’s story, character and theme are marshalled around the tasks the
player must carry out, a fundamental feature of all games. From the outset, we
learn that Wake is constantly under threat from ‘the darkness’, which manifests
in multiple ways, thereby demanding various actions of the player. This evil force
turns ordinary people into homicidal maniacs, a device that draws on a range
of American Gothic horror texts, from Herschel Gordon Lewis’ 2,000 Maniacs
(1964, US) and The Deliverance, through to The Shining – King’s novel (1977)
and Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation (1980). Various key non-playing characters
are commandeered, as well as numerous miners, woodsmen, townspeople, who
resemble zombies, slow and none-too-bright, making for easily-defeated foes when
not too numerous and dispatched with a range of semi-plausible incidental weapons.
The darkness itself also manifests visually as a mixture of hurricane-force wind
and black hole; often there is no defence against it and the only recourse is to run.
References here range from the silent film The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928, US.),
where a supernatural desert wind uncovers the body of the slain rapist, acting
as a kind of unforgiving, vengeful and even misogynist hand of God, through
to use of a black hole as demonic, possessing force in Event Horizon (Paul W.S.
Anderson, 1997, US). The source of the darkness, present as a form of corruption
and disruptive of the everyday and normal, is throughout the game a mystery, but
as one plays and finds pages from the forgotten book, Wake himself is increasingly
implicated in its generation. The game does however, at least on the surface, make
use of a classic binary of good-versus-evil. This is evident in the game’s most
prominent mechanic, which guides the rhythm of gameplay, and which very neatly
dovetails a ludic mechanic with a well-established Gothic theme. It very quickly
becomes apparent when first playing the game that light, from whatever source,
protects Wake from the fatal touch of the darkness in whatever form it takes - axe
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wielding maniac or deadly miasma. Given that the game takes place largely under
cover of darkness, the source of light is mainly electric, in the form of torches,
street lamps, head lamps, house lights, and lights designed to allow work outside
in the dark, powered by generators. Seeking out torches and batteries is one of the
main motivations for close exploration throughout the game; simply shooting these
supernaturally generated enemies alone without the aid of a paralysing light beam
from a torch fails to dispatch them.
The central use of the light mechanic makes a property of the environment
central to gameplay, providing diegetic plausibility, but it also works in other
more symbolic ways creating a rich textual coherence. It should be said that few
digital games work against conventions of good-versus-evil in a Gothic horror
context. This is partly to do with issues of regulation, but may also suggest that
clear moral positioning aids the interpolation of a player into the game diegesis
by making clear character motivation. As with so many other forms of popular
media, violence is very often justified within fiction under the banner of ‘good’.
Gothic horror, with its tangible supernaturalism, very often deploys such binaries
providing for the player a ‘feel-good’ factor, by militating against moral ambiguity.
Alan Wake is not, however, quite so straightforward in moral and metaphysical
terms. Wake is implicated as author of the darkness and, rather than providing an
example of a muscular hero, he is often running for his life, confused and stunned
rather than actively fighting for ‘good’. The Darkness maybe ‘out there’ but the
‘out there’ is also a product of Wake’s imagination. What the player must do is to
make use of light as a gameplay tool to stay alive in a very practical sense; while
metaphysical resonances are clearly in play, light is never given agency nor is it
personified.
The game most certainly ‘remediates’ other American Gothic texts and
formats, to use a term coined by Grusin and Bolter (2000) to explain how ideas
are recycled from one media to another. But this is no straight-forward repetition
as the game also refers very knowingly to other media. The ‘collectors’ edition’
is shaped like a book, for example, and televisions showing a Twilight Zone
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style show, as well as various forms of books, newsprint and radios, are found
throughout the gamespace. The game takes a structural framework from the serial
form, in particular that developed within American popular television but also
looking back to the episodic structure used by Charles Dickens in his version
of Gothic. There are cliff hangers at the end of ‘episodes’ and recaps on what
has gone before at the start of new ones. The use of televisual devices such as
these are not simply repetitive, as remediation implies. Ludic form means that a
player’s performance is under scrutiny throughout the game. If the player does
not pass muster, is unable or unwilling to ‘skill-up’ according the learning curve
of the game, there is no access to the rest of the story – Wake is left hanging on
the petard of his own imaginative construct. This crucial performative factor
divides digital games from other media. In this sense games prove to be media
that have unique capacity to resist their audience. This is why Alan Wake, like
many other games, has variable difficulty settings – it is however still a hard
game to complete, even on ‘easy’ mode and for a seasoned player. Alan Wake is
therefore a game that takes existing forms, themes and tropes of the American
Gothic and relocates them in the realm of player participation.
Alan Wake was originally designed to be an ‘open world’ game, meaning
that players would be able to roam in the game world freely, visiting landmarks
and picking up story elements in any order as However, the game designers soon
discovered that the open-world format that worked so well in for example the
Grand Theft Auto games was not well-suited to the topography of Gothic horror.
A core problem with the open format is that it proves difficult to determine the
order in which players discover plot nodes. The virtues of tight linear storytelling
with its temporally critical series of cause and effect chains were required if the
game was so lovingly to re-create the type of pace, suspense and dramatic tension
found in the American Gothic fictions to which the game refers. Remedy therefore
reverted to a closed format of the type that is more regularly used in singleplayer adventure games to more tightly control the player’s experience to afford
the types of affect we associate with the genre. In this, Alan Wake’s version of
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American Gothic calls not simply on the breathless roller-coaster plot structure of
Stephen King, but also on other Gothic traditions such as the lurid orchestrations
and manipulations of Grand Guignol theatre and the Ghost Train, where thrill
is produced by putting the audience ‘on-rails’ through the textual space, unable
therefore to slow the experience down and inspect the construction. This is not to
say that a more open world is unable to support an articulation of the American
Gothic in games, however. The Secret World provides an example of how this is
not just simply possible, but highly productive.
The Secret World: A Conspiracy of Signs
Released in June 2012, The Secret World was developed in Norway by Funcom
for a European and US market. The game expands on the grammar of existing
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing games (MMORPGs) and was the first
of the genre to place Gothic themes and forms centrally. To play the game players
need to be connected to the internet and pay a monthly subscription. Players
start out by building a character, choosing from a wide-range of possibilities the
look of that character, as well as selecting one of three factions: Dragon, Templar
or Illuminati. There are no fantasy races here; all characters models are human
and there are many physical characteristics, as well as clothes and accessories,
to select from. Unlike other MMORPGs games such as World of Warcraft
(2004-present), the game is set in a version of the ‘real’ world to which is added a
layer of supernaturalism, in accordance with the premise of Magic Realism. The
game pivots around the theme of the occult. Supernatural forces are in various
degrees of conflict, some which are organised and institutionalised, others are
merely chaotically evil, all of which are unseen under normal conditions. The
player-character awakens to find that they have acquired strange powers and are
called on to develop that power to fight against anti-human forces. They are sent
on a mission to Solomon Island located off the coast of New England where, in a
geographically appropriate manner, there is an outbreak of Lovecraftian Mythos.
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In this the game draws on a very specific and highly influential regional accent
of the American Gothic.
The ingénue player arrives in the area’s main town, Kingsmouth to discover
a running battle between living and dead townsfolk – seemingly a classic
zombie-situation. Players are requisitioned by the local Sheriff to run errands,
conducted while also gathering knowledge for their faction. It soon becomes plain
that zombies are the least of the town’s troubles and symptomatic of a far more
dangerous threat to humanity. While later players are sent to other parts of the
world, they spend a lengthy period in the New England area, pursuing a range of
goals and engaging with a range of geographically-appropriate myths and texts.
The game is, however, much more open than Alan Wake and players are free to
quest, indulge in exploration, shop, gather, or fight other factions. Accumulative,
slow-burn character development and world-building is where emphasis lies in this
game, affecting its rendition of the American Gothic and providing a distinction
from the classic literary unity that governs Alan Wake. Polyphony is created by
collecting together numerous Gothic accents as a means of creating a strong
sense of ‘worldness’ for players. In addition to American Gothic, we encounter
Steampunk/Victorian Gothic, Eastern mysticism and martial arts, witchcraft and
various versions of folk magic, Occultism and occult systems, ranging from John
Dee through to post-Quantum theory Chaos Magic.
The New England location places the game firmly within American Gothic
and it is ripe with heavily accented stories and histories. Myth and reality as
interlaced, characteristic of Magic Realism. What the player encounters in
Kingsmouth is a catastrophe that has objective reality in diegetic terms. It is not
a subjective projection of a delirious author, as with Alan Wake. The objective
approach is a necessary property of MMORPG form. The Secret World demands
collectivity in the fight for the survival of the human race, within which the
player plays their small but robust part. Nonetheless this is a game and a world
woven from many intertexts. The game’s environment is testimony to this. The
closeness of the name Kingsmouth to the Innsmouth of Lovecraft’s short stories
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‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ is enough to alert the
literate player to an important legacy requisite to the American Gothic and to
Lovecraft’s ‘fictionalized New England landscape’ (Joshi, 1999: xvii). Entry into
the town reveals street names, such as Dunwich Road, Arkham Avenue (probably
more widely-known in the contemporary imaginary from the Asylum of the
Batman franchise, yet a key fictional place in Lovecraft’s geographic mythos) and
Lovecraft Lane. Other popular American Gothic texts are evoked in the names of
landmarks such as Poe Cove and Elm Street. A short trip down the Dunwich Road
confirms that we are knee-deep in Lovecraft’s Mythos: boxes of rotting squid lie
abandoned yet half eaten on a zombie-infested street, and if the trail of empty
boxes are followed the player is greeted by a large tentacled sea monster. The
boxes state in bright lettering, ‘Fresh from the deep to your door’ and ‘Product of
the USA’ –implicating human activity in the plight of the town. The first group
task that the player encounters is, of course, to defeat an enormous tentacle seamonster: Cthulhu in all but name (Lovecraft fans might note that the location
better suggests the less well-known monster, Dagon). The game is then thickly
populated with many and diverse intertexts, creating a rich and highly readable
texture that rewards generic knowledge.
In combining American Gothic with Magic Realism, The Secret World
achieves a distinctive blend of fact and fiction. Like conspiracy theory, the
mythical is made real within the game. Every sign is to be read and decoded as
indexical of a great hidden, occulted, system. This is made evident in the design
of the game environment, exemplified by an early quest, ‘The Kingsmouth Code’.
Players seek out signs inscribed into the fabric of the town’s infrastructure left by
the founding fathers of the town, who were members of the Illuminati faction.
These signs lead the player to understand something of their secret activities and
quest for power. Games generally often employ environment to convey story,
thereby placing the player in the role of investigator. Playing any game requires of
the player, at some stage, acts of close reading. In the context of a game drawing on
the Gothic, close reading is not only constitutive of a ludic mode of engagement but
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also fuses that engagement to thematic syntax. The requirement of close reading
has in particular a special resonance with Poe’s Gothic detective, Dupin. The
investigative act of gathering and attending to fragments in order construct story
is a central mechanism of The Secret World and one that is infused with what
we might term a ‘conspiracy-style’ approach to reading. ‘Lore’ fragments, which
tell snippets of a larger story/history in written form, for example, are scattered
around the gamespace, often hidden in hard to locate places. These build into a rich
tapestry of back stories, encouraging players to find each fragment to complete
a given story arc. If collected, players can read, for example, crew-member’s tale
about the terror he encountered at sea, his ship now anchored in Kingsmouth
monster-infested dock, delivered in the same peculiarly crusted enunciative style
of Lovecraft’s writing. This story arc dovetails into another strand of lore entitled,
‘The Fog’, following Stephen King’s novel, detailing the arrival of the fog in
Kingsmouth. In addition to the use of ‘lore’ as a storytelling device, Kingsmouth
is peopled by figures of American mythology, each of whom have their individual
story and add colour. Sandy ‘Moose’ Jansen is free-wheeling, philosopher-biker,
repurposing himself as explosives expert and Norma Creed is an old-lady with
a smoking rifle and a gritty attitude. The horror writer - fast becoming a staple
figure of American Gothic - is also represented, in homage to King yet also to
Alan Wake. Here however he appears as Sam Kreig, a hard-drinking, world-sour
writer notably, with regard to Wake, living in the Kingsmouth lighthouse. Within
The Secret World, storytelling is a multi-dimensional assemblage of fragments
and remnants. It is far more than simply a means of giving meaning to progress
bars, instead it is a complex and carefully constructed tapestry aimed to locate the
player in terms of place and time, geared toward encouraging a close engagement
with the game as text. Like the conspiracy theorist, the player of The Secret World
is invited to put together an assemblage of signs in order to ascertain underlying
patterns. Nowhere is this more apparent as in the game’s ‘investigative’ quests.
The Secret World provides a range of different types of quest activities
available for players. Some involve stealth-style missions, others collection-type
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activities, while others send the players down a central story-arc, but the most
innovative are the investigation quests. These conjure with materials similar to
those of Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’. Of all the quest types these are most wellsuited to the gamification of American Gothic. This is one example of many. The
quest is entitled ‘Angels and Demons’. The player has to find out if a company
operating in the zone is a front for something more murky. On entering their
offices, the player encounters a dead employee, an ID card can be retrieved from
the corpse. This provides a clue to gaining access to the man’s email system and
it is delivered as a type of riddle, ‘My surname is common in classic literature.
And my clearance level is the key.’ The ID card shows that the man’s name is H.
Glass and his clearance level is: Gold-bug. ‘The Gold-bug’ is a short-story by
Poe designed to be published in episodes in 1893; players are likely to find this
out by googling using the game’s inbuilt web-browser. Poe’s story has within it a
cryptographic code, made up by the pirate Captain Kidd, to disguise the location
of his treasure. Using this code to render the word ‘Glass’ gives entry to the
computer and the evidence required. This quest is neatly emblematic of the way
that The Secret World translates the American Gothic into game form. Not only
is the Gold-bug part of the family of scarab beetles, relevant to therefore to the
Egyptian location, but the story has a puzzle at its heart, a cryptographic puzzle
that Poe challenged readers to solve. In many other such missions, the player
must closely read the game’s geography and it helps to have a high-end graphics
processor to better the signs and notices that litter the gamespace. The in-game
internet browser is designed to help players make sense of the more abstruse
clues, looking up chapter-and-verse in the Bible, for example, in the case of ‘The
Kingsmouth Code’, or hunting down the source of The Gold-bug. In bringing the
internet into the game space, the borders of fiction and fact are softened, in accord
with a central plank of Gothic fiction, and the sense of conspiracy is strengthened.
One of advantages of the blurring of fact and fiction is that it adds depth and
diversity to a given fiction and it is often the case that horror has often tried to
convince the reader in various ways not just to suspend disbelief, but instead to
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read psychotically and believe, providing a further association with conspiracystyle reading. The presence of puzzles, enigmas and fragments invites the player
to go deeper into the text, the ludic hermeneutics of which can be regarded as
an innovation in the way that players are engaged and marking a significant and
powerful addition to the American Gothic.
Conclusion
American Gothic is a property of the act of fiction-making and as such is
amenable to translation into digital game form. In digital games, American Gothic
is rarely centred on the nationality of authors, in fact it seems much more likely to
be called upon by European and Japanese game designers. Instead it is generally
focused around the location of a game and the concomitant themes, myths and tropes.
These are often deployed as means of creating meaning and depth, as well
as appealing to the literacies of players, as indicated by The Secret World. The
Silent Hill franchise also deploys American Gothic as an extension of a Japanese
incomprehension at the inherent surrealism found in David Lynch’s version of
American Gothic, producing some extremely interesting distortions of the syntax
(see Martin Picard, 2009: pp. 96-97).
The return of the repressed is a staple theme of American Gothic texts and it
is fruitful to look at how it informs games. Midnight Mysteries: Salem Witch Trials
(Mumbojumbo, 2012) is a simple point and click, find-the-hidden object, game set in
Salem. Like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
(1850), the game reveals a bloody and persecutory history, very far from the American
dream. Players help the restless spirit of Hawthorne to solve the mystery of his own
death before he is able to Rest In Peace; that Hawthorne’s father was a Judge in the
Witch Trials is also implicated in this articulation of the return of the repressed. The
unquiet dead, rising in anger, regret or as result of greed, are staple populous of games.
Where they bear an American accent, there is often an implicit, sometimes explicit,
indictment of social, familial or institutional practices and mores. In The Secret World
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one mission sends the player beyond the town graveyard to look for unmarked mass
graves. One of which contains the burned bodies of Salem witches and another the bodies
of suffocated miners – an industrial accident covered up. These dead are powerful and
resonant adversaries. Wake’s haunting is of his own making. While there is mention of
indigenous people, where in native sacred grounds are desecrated by white immigrants,
the nub of the matter hinges around the disappearance of Wake’s wife. She is ‘of the
other’ in this game, victimised and importantly emblematic of fear itself: it is she that
fears the dark and not Wake, who comes to fear it. Fear is what has been repressed,
othered and then floridly returns. Gender difference is therefore implicated and given
voice in this articulation of the return of the repressed; the lost and fearful wife defined
by that which is remaindered by masculinity. Freud’s concept finds, therefore, fertile
ground in the context of American Gothic games.
While ‘American Gothic’ is not a term commonly used by players to categorize
games, it is nonetheless a profitable means of understanding the nature of contemporary
games. Generally the Gothic in games is far from easy to pin down because it has so
many forms. The American Gothic is much easier to locate. It is a comprised of a set of
conventionalized tropes, with setting as a principle player. With so many games using
such tropes, the American Gothic has become a staple of gaming and it has become
embedded in the global language spoken by games. This ubiquity does, however, make
a nationalised notion of Gothic in the context of games problematic: it is no longer a
property of objective, geographic reality but has instead become inscribed into and
through the grammar of games.
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Suggestions for Further Reading
A greater understanding of Gothic themes in the context of digital games can be found in the
following:
KRZYWINSKA, T. (2002) Hands-on horror. In G. King & T. Krzywinska (eds.), ScreenPlay:
Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wallflower Press. Pp206-223.
PERRON, B. (Ed.) Horror Video Games. Jefferson: McFarland.
PERRON, B. (2012 ) Silent Hill: The Terror Engine. University of Michigan/Digital Culture
Books.
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